With 1ly/sec, you're out of the galaxy in 1 day, so good luck to enter another galaxy.

Yeah and you would be moving so fast and space is so vast you would more than likely just zip by stars. You would probably have to fly through the entire observable universe a few times before you hit any stars. Doesn't seem like 20 years would quite cut it.

It would also happen so fast you wouldn't notice the star getting larger before you hit it.

Sometimes I like to fly through Space Engine in spaceship mode at a few 100 kpc/s, and wait to 'hit' a galaxy. It is many orders of magnitude more likely than hitting a star, but it still takes a while.

where Psid is the sidereal rotation period, Psol is the length of solar day, and Porb is the orbital period.

If the planet is rotating retrograde, then the sign flips and we instead subtract the last term.

The Earth's sidereal period is ~86164.1 seconds. The orbital period is 3.1558x107 seconds. Solve for Psol in the retrograde case and we get 85929.5 seconds, or 23hr52min9.5sec. So the solar day would be shorter, as one might expect (Earth has to spin through a smaller angle to return to the same orientation relative to the sun).

Now take Porb/Psol and we obtain 367.25 solar days in the year if the Earth spun backward.

Do you guys know what else would happen if the Earth reversed its rotation? Everyone would die horribly as the crust of the earth breaks apart.

Of course, that's besides the point... everyone dies anyway. Sooner or later, due to disease, the breakdown of the human body, extreme physical damage, or suicide from existential boredom, everyone will be have their time. People die, stars die, the universe dies, everything dies; with death, sadness, destruction, the cosmos is an indifferent place and everyone is insignificant and there's taxes and greed and famine and social problems and war and poverty and run-on sentences, and just in case this post has failed to create an emotional reaction within its readers, let me remind us all of unhappy things like kids/babies crying, explosions, and... clogged toilets?

It is my pleasure to say such happy and uplifting things to make everyone feel better about their life and themselves; have a good day everybody

Yep, we'd be just fine if the Earth started out spinning retrograde. If the spin suddenly reversed direction right now though, there would be problems, depending on how sudden the change was. Instantaneous reversal would be an interesting event as everybody suddenly goes flying eastward at up to 930 meters per second. (Brace yourselves, low-latitude peoples.) Would get some nice wave action out of that, too. (Beach party!)

If the spin suddenly reversed direction right now though, there would be problems, depending on how sudden the change was. Instantaneous reversal would be an interesting event as everybody suddenly goes flying eastward at up to 930 meters per second. (Brace yourselves, low-latitude peoples.) Would get some nice wave action out of that, too. (Beach party!)